Pembroke Public Schools adds new teaching and learning supervisor position

Saturday

Aug 16, 2014 at 10:00 AM

After combining and eliminating positions throughout the school district, and seeing significant savings from replacing retired teachers, Pembroke Schools Superintendent Frank Hackett found there was extra money in the budget. Last week, the school committee approved using some of those funds to create a new position — a teaching and learning supervisor for all of Pembroke schools.

Mark Burridge mburridge@wickedlocal.com

After combining and eliminating positions throughout the school district, and seeing significant savings from replacing retired teachers, Pembroke Schools Superintendent Frank Hackett found there was extra money in the budget. Last week, the school committee approved using some of those funds to create a new position — a teaching and learning supervisor for all of Pembroke schools.

“The position will do a lot for us,” Hackett said. “They will be a key member of the leadership team, supervising department heads through the transition to common core, with PARCC testing and teacher evaluations.”

Hackett said the candidate for the position will help department heads and teachers with the tricky switch to the new basic learning requirements the district will need with the Common Core. For that reason, Hackett said he was looking for a candidate that could communicate well.

“We want someone with a strong teaching background, and department head or leadership experience,” he said. “We’re not looking for a principal, we want more like a department head or a teacher leader.”

Hackett said he has a list of candidates to choose from, but isn’t ready to declare finalists for the position yet. Although he did say he thought a decision would be made soon.

“The process should be wrapped up by next week,” he said.

Toward the end of the last school year, the administration made a few cuts to try to remain under budget. The head of English department and the Social Studies department head were combined into a Humanities department head. The assistant director of education position was eliminated as well.

Hackett said there were a few unexpected savings as well. He said multiple teachers who retired were replaced with teachers with lower salaries, and when the high school librarian retired, he chose not to hire any of the replacement candidates.

“We advertized, but we didn’t get many applicants, and we didn’t get a candidate we liked,” he said.

Next year, the high school will use part-time workers to temporarily fill the position and will look into hiring a full time librarian again after the school year.

In the mean time, Hackett said so much money had become available, he decided to create the position to help with the transition to the common core, as well as the move away from MCAS and to PARCC testing.

Hackett said after the position is filled, the candidate will start right away, and the first duty for the new employee will be to create a schedule.

“They will work with the leadership team and the department heads to map out where the work is going,” he said. “They will develop goals.”